


Peaceful Tyranny

by hellkitty



Category: Transformers (IDW Generation One)
Genre: M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-21
Updated: 2012-11-21
Packaged: 2017-11-19 04:05:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,257
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/568888
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellkitty/pseuds/hellkitty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Just a storehouse for some DJD ficlets/headcanony bits</p>
            </blockquote>





	Peaceful Tyranny

This batch is three tf_speedwriting prompts.

 

1\. Modified

Kaon rested one palm against the bulkhead of the _Peaceful Tyranny_ , just…feeling.  Others thought his sightlessness was an impediment.  He didn’t stop them: better to take and keep the advantage. Better not to let them know what they missed.

Which was this: sensing the ship, instead of merely seeing it.  The ship was an intricate lacework of energy, an exquisite net, tunnels of light and sound, thrumming with a beautiful aliveness that he’d never known when he’d been hampered by optics. 

It had hurt, at first and he remembered pain, physical and mental. He remembered feeling crippled, maimed. He remembered a panic of regret, a lamentation of what he’d done. He remembered thinking the price had been too high.

Kaon didn’t think so, now.  He’d fought to see back then, blowing out pair after pair of optics, his own frame running charge far too high for their capacitance. And the loss hurt more and more and less and less each time, until he gave up on optics, surrendering to the darkness.

And in all surrenders, he knew, there was a kind of freedom. And this freedom had found him and wrapped him in gossamer touches, light and beautiful.

“Kaon.”

Tarn’s voice, behind him, musical as always, like wings of gossamer billowing around Kaon.  Tarn had his vanity, and it was all in the timbre of his voice, its ability to stir the air around it. To Kaon it looked like a shimmering swirl of color, spinning silk against the darkness.

“Yes,” Kaon said, pulling himself from his reverie, withdrawing his hand from the ship’s cool bulkhead. He could feel the fuzz of charge stretch against his palm, like a friend’s touch, lingering and slow. 

“We’re nearly there.”  The larger mech stepped beside him, the purple mask inscrutable as it tilted down to look at him, coldly fond. Kaon could feel the tension rippling off the other in dense, black waves.

Kaon nodded, understanding his charge. “I will be ready.”

 

2.Reality is wrong. Dreams are for real. - Tupac Shakur

Tarn settled into a recharge cradle, trying to fight the itch above his spark.  This was the worst part for him, with the anticipation of a kill dangling before him, just out of reach, Sisyphean and taunting. He wanted it. He needed it, the heady rush of power, feeling  a life truncated, snipped off at his merest whisper.  He needed the thrum of the sonic oscillators, reaching and matching spark frequency. He needed the proximity it brought him, to another’s very, most basic existence.

He wanted to transform. He wanted it so badly, just to take the edge off, just to feel the vibration, tickling and wonderful, against his spark.  But he’d seen his supply dwindle after the loss of Delphi, and even having Pharma’s transformation cog warm in his chassis only brought a certain—intellectual—pleasure.

Kaon would judge him for it, from those blank pits of his optics. It was strange how those dark hollows held him. He wondered sometimes how he looked through Kaon’s senses.

But right now, all he wanted was some blissful reprieve. Right now, he wanted peace and power. 

The recharging cable was no transformation, it was no quivering, guttering spark clinging frantically for life.  But it brought a blissful shutdown, which cast aside ambiguity, a world of sensuous freedom stretching before him, the awful itch of the unjust world, groaning beneath the shackles of disloyalty, sated at last.

And he could hope to dream of the world Megatron had promised them, of Megatron himself, glowing with pride, stretching forth an approving hand, the only hand under which Tarn would bend.

 

3\. Yesterday

“Yesterday,” Kaon said, and then repeated the word, slowly, stretching it out almost to the point of fracturing into nonsense.

Vos tilted his head, as though he could taste the word in the air. “Heeessss….” He paused, optics narrowing as though he were aware he’d lost the thread of it, as though the word was a prey that had slipped into deep brush. 

Kaon gave a patient grin at the  smaller mech.  Vos was a brilliant medic, but he’d been learning Neo Cybex for the last twenty metacycles and still had only a handful of vocabulary words.  The medic had explained it to him, once, through a series of diagrams and clicks, that  the whole thing resulted from an accident that had shorted his medial temporal gyrus, under the reign of Zeta Prime. Still, it amused them to try, and there was a certain, wriggling pride Vos exhibited on the rare occasions when he did remember a word or phrase.

“Yesterday,” he repeated. He couldn’t see Vos, not that way: the mech was a complex net of color and sound. He could hear the damaged area in Vos’s cortex: he could also hear/see the other’s struggle to learn, the red-grey of frustration.

“Meeeaans?”  Vos’s voice was always thready and faint when he spoke NeoCybex. Something about the processor cut, the language only having an audio component, that foxed his vocalizer.

“It means ‘the day before’.”  Kaon considered. “Now,” he said, tapping the table between them. “Here. Now. Today.”  He waited for the small nod from the masked face, the way the energy frame would bow and dip, before pointing behind him. “Yesterday.” 

“Yest’ay,” Vos managed, patting his own shoulder.

“No.  Not shoulder. This,” Kaon tapped his Tesla coil, “Body part. You know body parts.”  Tarn had drilled him enough, after each kill.  “Yesterday is time.” 

“Tiiiiiime.”

An approving nod. He could feel Vos’s optics on his face, the attention like tendrils of light brushing his blank sockets, down his cheeks, seeking just that sign of approbation. “Time,” he agreed. “Time.  Today.” He tipped his head. “Yesterday.  Done.” 

“Time. Done.” The small hands curled on the table as though gripping the concepts. 

Another nod, and he could feel in his read of Vos’s energy signature a warm glow of achievement.  “Yes. Ser. ‘ay.”  The head gave one of its birdlike tilts, and Kaon felt the pulse of energy along the mech’s systems.  And then the cautious little blip on his comm,  the small hand reaching for his, tipping up to expose the hardline connector in his wrist. 

Vos wanted to talk.  Kaon laid his own hand over the energy lacework of Vos’s open palm, the shock of armor always jarring after being so used to seeing a mech as a fuzzed, glittering net of electrons.  His palm slid up, until his connector clicked into Vos’s.  And all distance evaporated between them: Kaon’s blindness, Vos’s speech, meant nothing, as they swirled through each other’s sensor feeds. 

::Yesterday,:: Vos said, in his Primal Vernacular, words having sound and color and texture and weight.  His voice was so different in here—immaterial and yet somehow more real. 

::Yes,:: Kaon said, hearing his own voice, here sounding hollow compared to Vos’s. 

“Yesterday-yesterday-yesterday,” Vos said, his pronunciation cracked and halting. ::Long time gone,:: he echoed through the hard line, as though translating himself.

“Yes.”

“Before.”  The hand fluttered under Kaon’s, the small digits moving to curl around his wrist. ::Before the war began.::

“Yes,” Kaon said, nodding again, encouraging. Vos’s halting speech always built a sense of gravity, of weight, and he found himself tipping forward in anticipation of the next word, reaching for it with the net of words he’d need to make it make sense.

“Better.”  

His own hand tightened in Vos’s, feeling the indigo riptide of melancholy from the other mech.

“Yes.”


End file.
